This short history tells the story of five hundred years of papermaking against the general background of the coming of paper and printing in Britain, through the major developments of the Industrial Revolution, up to the technological advances which have made possible the enormous high-speed paper machines of the present day.

Paper and the British Empire examines the evolution of the paper industry within British organisational frameworks and highlights the role of the Empire as a market and business-making area in a world of shrinking commerce and rising trade barriers. Drawing on a valuable range of primary sources, this book covers the period 1861–1960 and examines events from the establishment of free trade backed by the gold standard to Britain’s membership of the European Free Trade Association. In the field of the paper industry, the speed and intensity of the industrialisation process around the globe have been shaped by a wide variety of variables, including the surrounding institutional framework; entrepreneurial and organisational strategies; the cost and accessibility of transport; and the availability of capital, knowledge, energy resources, and technology. The supply of papermaking raw materials has also been key and has historically been the most important determinant for geographical location and dominance. The research in this work focuses on the roles played by such variants, on the one hand, and demand characteristics on the other. In particular, it considers developments connected to a quest for Empire-grown raw materials in order to tackle the problem of the lack of indigenous raw materials and the resulting dependence on Scandinavian wood pulp imports. This text is of considerable interest to advanced students and researchers in economic history, business history, and the paper industry, and will also be useful to organisations working within the pulp and paper industries.

This book presents an historical analysis of the global paper industry evolution from a comparative perspective. At the centre are 16 producing countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, the USA, Germany, Canada, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Russia). A comparative study of the paper industry evolution can achieve the following important research objectives. First, we can identify the country specific historical features of paper industry evolution and compare them to the general business trends explicable by existing theoretical knowledge. Second, we can identify and isolate the factors causing both the rise and fall of industrial populations. Third, a shared research agenda can produce an intensive analysis of global industry dynamics. Finally, an extended research period of 250 years can identify what is truly unique in the paper industry evolution and the extent to which it took the same path as other important manufacturing industries.

Waste Paper in Early Modern England argues that rhetorical commonplaces referring to waste paper are indicative of everyday, material experience - of an author's, reader's, housewife's, or city-dweller's immersion in an environment brimming with repurposed scraps and sheets.

This pioneering 1997 study examines the economic development of the British paper industry between 1860 and 1914 - an era in which it is often claimed that the origins of Britain's relative economic decline are first witnessed. For paper-making, this was also a period in which an array of important new forces, including inter alia the development of new raw materials and the move to ever larger scales of production, came on the scene. Gary Bryan Magee looks at the effect of these changes and assesses how effectively the industry coped with the new pressures, drawing upon an extensive range of quantitative and archival sources from Britain, America, and other countries. Along the way, Dr Magee addresses issues central to the understanding of industrial competitiveness, such as technological change, entrepreneurship, productivity, trade policy, and industrial relations.

This contributed volume provides 11 illustrative case studies of technological transformation in the global pulp and paper industry from the inception of mechanical papermaking in early nineteenth century Europe until its recent developments in today’s business environment with rapidly changing market dynamics and consumer behaviour. It deals with the relationships between technology transfer, technology leadership, raw material dependence, and product variety on a global scale. The study itemises the main drivers in technology transfer that affected this process, including the availability of technology, knowledge, investments and raw materials on the one hand, and demand characteristics on the other hand, within regional, national and transnational organisational frameworks. The volume is intended as a basic introduction to the history of papermaking technology, and it is aimed at students and teachers as course material and as a handbook for professionals working in either industry, research centres or universities. It caters to graduate audiences in forestry, business, technical sciences, and history.

Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments—even when the metaphors have become untethered from their original intent. Why is "whitespace" white? Was the digital page always a foregone conclusion? Over a series of theses, Eve addresses these and other questions in order to understand the moments when digital-textual metaphors break and to show us how it is that our textual softwares become locked into paradigms that no longer make sense. Contributing to book history, literary studies, new media studies, and material textual studies, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History provides generative insights into the metaphors that define our digital worlds.